Mathematics is crazy and dreadful, says Nigel Molesworth, the cynical elementary school student whose lack of interest in learning is identified by readers of his delicious fictional school tales who haven't attended a third-rate private boarding school of the kind Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle have in their beloved Molesworth - Caricature books from the fifties.

We don't know what's next for the boy who describes himself as a teacher's curse.

He knows he'll never be a smartass, but still expresses hope that a "huge lout with no brains" will find somewhere to work, in which case there might still be a chance of being knighted.

What is certain is that Molesworth would have seized the first opportunity to give up mathematics.

This system not only requires that students have to commit themselves to an educational path at an age when they usually have no precise ideas about the future.

It also creates large educational gaps for those who drop out of history, foreign languages ​​and mathematics after the age of sixteen.

According to statistics, only half of 16- to 19-year-old students learn mathematics, with the result that large parts of the population are weak in mathematics.

According to the government, the numeracy of eight million adults does not extend beyond elementary school.

As a critic of excessive specialization, Rishi Sunak wants to counteract this.

The new British Prime Minister plans to make mathematics a compulsory subject in England by the age of eighteen in order to better equip school leavers for the data and technology-oriented economy of tomorrow.

The measure was heralded by Downing Street as the centerpiece of Sunak's vision for the future of the country, outlined in a keynote speech on Wednesday, and promptly picked apart by both opposition and party ranks in light of the grave current situation.

Like teachers their math students, Labor politicians urged the Prime Minister to state his solution.

Others countered that two more years of mathematics lessons would not help those who had not grasped the subject by the age of sixteen.

some joke,

that the country's hardships would be less if Liz Truss and Kwazi Kwarteng could do better math.

The fact that the prime minister, who has been in office for the shortest time, specialized in mathematics at school and studied economics at Oxford, among other things, seems to have done her little good.